Clean and season a chicken with salt and pepper and let boil until tender. Put the chicken in a baking-dish; pour over some tomato-sauce highly seasoned; sprinkle with well-buttered bread-crumbs and let bake until brown. Place on a large platter with a border of boiled rice and pour over the sauce. Serve hot.
A two-stage dish: the bird is poached, then finished under crumbs in the oven. The original gives no quantities, temperatures or times, so the judgment calls are all yours.
- The hingeDespite the instruction to "boil," a bare simmer serves better than a rolling boil, or the breast will be dry and stringy before the legs are tender. A 3½–4 lb chicken will take roughly an hour held just below the boil.
- Whole or jointed"A chicken" in books of this period generally meant a young bird of 3–4 lb. Cutting it into eight pieces before poaching makes the baking stage far easier to portion and serve.
- OvenNo temperature is given. 400F for 15–20 minutes browns the crumbs without drying the meat; run the broiler for the last minute if the top is still pale.
- Buttered bread-crumbsThis means fresh crumbs tossed with melted butter until they glisten — roughly 1 cup crumbs to 2 tablespoons butter. Dry commercial crumbs will scorch rather than brown.
- Tomato-sauce, highly seasonedWhat makes this "Spanish" here is the seasoning: onion, garlic, sweet paprika or pimiento, a bay leaf. About 2 to 2½ cups of sauce is right for one bird, some poured over before baking and the rest reserved for the platter.
- Use the poaching liquidThe broth is the best thing in the pot. Cook the rice in it and thin the tomato sauce with it rather than pouring it away.
- YieldOne chicken with rice serves four.
Books of this kind — a dish a day, each pinned to a nation — are generally associated with the years around the First World War, when American home cooks were being introduced to "foreign cookery" in tidy, reassuring doses. What earns the label "Spanish" is the tomato-and-pepper sauce: through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, English-language cookbooks used "Spanish" as shorthand for almost anything sauced with tomato, onion and sweet or hot pepper, a usage that also gave us Spanish rice and the Spanish omelet. The dish itself is less Iberian than thrifty American practice, closer to a way of using up a boiled fowl: poach, sauce, crumb, brown. The ring of boiled rice around the platter is often said to have been a common presentation for anything wet, doing the work a modern cook would give to a bowl.